Updates to results appearing on Ask.com for weather- and earthquake-related queries have provided more visual information and several new features.
Ask Wants To Talk About The Weather
“Lexington, KY Today 7:37 a.m. (EDT) Low clouds 43 F. Drizzle. Low clouds. Nippy.” That is a look at the current weather in the murdok home city, courtesy of Ask.com and its 7 Day Forecast available as part of a recent update.
The Ask team posted news about the latest weather-related goodies for the search engine. That 7 Day Forecast look includes a Map of Current Conditions, which can be switched from Forecast to Satellite or Doppler views.
Those views are provided by CustomWeather, Inc. Both the Satellite and Doppler maps have a Play button that can be clicked to show projected movement of weather systems.
If the National Weather Service has issued an alert for an area, as they did this morning for Lexington, the user can mouseover the alert to make it popup on the screen. The alert can be clicked to view it on a static page too.
They also added more information about earthquakes to the search engine:
Now when you run a basic search for “earthquakes“, click on the Area Earthquakes Activity link and in very short order, you’ll have a map with each earthquake visible on the map as a red circle. On the left side of the page, a text list of each quake is provided. The location is hyperlinked. You can also get info about the quake by clicking the various numbers on the map.
Those who don’t follow earthquake activity (like me) may be surprised to see how much takes place on a daily basis. Ask’s feature showed 18 quakes of varying magnitude took place on September 28th, with several of them shaking up locations in Alaska, California, Maine, New Mexico, and Utah, as well as overseas.
—
Tag:
Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl
David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.